Sponsor entities create advertisements or offers for available goods, services or opportunities and have several available options for distributing these advertisements to the public. One of the options available for sponsor entities involves posted listing aggregation web sites. These web sites are configured in a way that is similar to a newspaper classified section—providing a centralized location for multiple users to create and publish listings which may describe goods, services, or opportunities that are available to the public. Often such sites publish listings for free or for a nominal charge. The simplicity, ease of use and inexpensive nature of posted listing aggregation web sites have contributed to a broad proliferation across the internet of these types of sites. Fundamentally, posted listing web sites are based on a passive approach to distributing posted listings—publishing a listing and waiting for a web user to search the internet and find the offered good, service or opportunity.
However, this approach also presents several obstacles for posted listing sponsors (the entities that offer the available goods/services/opportunities). Posted listings often include a short description of an available good, service, or opportunity, as well as an email contact for responding to the available goods, services or opportunities. It is difficult to evaluate the efficacy of this type of posted listing. Generally, posted listing aggregation web sites do not facilitate determining performance metrics related to the quality and/or quantity of web user interaction with a particular posted listing. Furthermore, there are significant issues the related to effective life-span of a posted listing. When a sponsor entity generates a posted listing, the new posted listing is often simply added to a queue of listings displayed based on the time/date of the posting. As such, the posted listing's prominence only lasts until another web user generates a new posted listing on the aggregation web site. For these reasons, the efficacy and lifespan of a posted listing may be extremely limited.